Skulls of the Shogun Preview

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Can turn-based strategy be even more accessible than Advance Wars?

By Daemon Hatfield

Fans of turn-based strategy games like Advance Wars and Shining Force should keep an eye out for Skulls of the Shogun, the first effort from Haunted Temple Studios. Comprised of a few former Electronic Arts developers, the team set out to create something decidedly smaller than the AAA blockbusters-that-promise-gamers-everything they were working on at EA. Skulls of the Shogun is a more accessible take on the strategy genre that Haunted Temple hopes will remind gamers of the good old 16-bit days.

Like other games of the sort, players take turns giving orders to their troops on the battlefield. The first non-traditional aspect you'll notice is the absence of a grid that would normally lock your units to individual squares. Here, you can move a unit freely within its movement range. Only five orders can be given during a turn, so if you have more than five units you'll want to spend those orders wisely. An order could consist of attacking, healing, or "haunting" an area. Haunting is how you claim resources that can be spent to summon new units.

Those rings around the units represent the wall they've created by standing next to one another.

Another order you can give your troops reveals where Skulls of the Shogun gets its name. A defeated samurai leaves his skull behind, which other units can pick up. Claimed skulls give a boost of health, and if a unit picks up three they'll be transformed into a powerful demon that can attack twice in one turn (regular units cannot).

Units that are placed close enough together will create a sort of wall that the enemy can't move through. This way, you can protect weaker or important units by strategically moving their comrades around them.

Your goal in Skulls of the Shogun is to defeat your opponent's general. A general isn't activated at the start of a game. He'll hang out in the back of your army, gaining health each turn and becoming more powerful each turn he isn't used. When it's time to bring him out you can give the order to activate him, but you'll want to hold out as long as you can so you can have the most powerful general possible. Generals can also pick up skulls and transform into demon generals.

You can only issue five orders during a turn in Skulls of the Shogun.

Haunted Temple brought Skulls of the Shogun by the IGN office to show us the multiplayer mode. One game took us about 25 minutes, and after it was over I felt I had a pretty good handle on how it all works – looks like Haunted Temple may be succeeding at making a more accessible turn-based strategy game. We tried a two-player game, but the finished product will support up to four players. Units from different teams can be banded together to create walls, so players can form alliances in order to crush a common enemy. Only one team can win the game, though, so those alliances will eventually have to be broken. Haunted Temple wants the multiplayer mode to be a friendly, painless experience so players can drop in and out whenever they like, AI players can be substituted for humans on the fly, and you can save a game at any time.

We haven't seen the single-player campaign, yet, but we are told there will be an epic, humorous story that takes players across a variety of landscapes.

Haunted Temple is currently looking for a publisher for Skulls of the Shogun. What we've seen so far looks promising.